October 24, 2007
"By all good souls is he abhorred...
...who'd make a Babbitt of the Lord" is the moral of Thurber's fable, "The Bat Who Got the Hell Out". This story, about the revival-meeting atmosphere of the Colorado Rockies, is irritating to the point of creepiness, rolling up fatuous pietism, hypocrisy, and flat-out blasphemy, in a wrapper reeking of intolerance and pride, and generallly besmirching two institutions that deserve better (baseball and Christianity).
The idea that a God one might worship should be invoked to give your baseball team (!) an edge over another approaches the arrogance of the "God is my copilot" bumpersticker. The value structure under which a player who solicits a prostitute is fired and $16m of his contract with him, while a manager nailed for drunk driving (which can kill people) just gets to make everyone else act more better is not easy for me to distill out of the Bible. Apparently these guys believe it's their faith and clean living that explains their amazing run of wins: can we infer that if they go down in the series they all fell off their pompous wagon in Boston dives of the Scollay Square tradition? are any of these millionaires thinking about camels and eyes of needles, or does that apply only to some other false sect? Of course Ty Cobb's Christian forbearance, generosity, and clean living was the source of his ballplaying chops...
Sheesh; let's render unto with a sense of fitness and proportion, or we'll be starting games with "Pray ball!"
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